Here's a newspaper feature on how people's moods and self-esteem fluctuate with the performance of their favorite sports teams. A variety of studies were covered by a journalist for the Washington Post, under the title, Self-esteem of sports fans is linked to their team, research shows.
The article introduces readers to the terms BIRGing and CORFing, which are defined as follows:
If their team wins, fans wear team colors the following day and brag about how “we” won the day, a behavior researchers have dubbed “basking in reflected glory,” or BIRGing. But if their team loses, fans cast off their team jerseys and talk about how “they” did not perform as well, thereby “cutting off reflected failure,” or CORFing.
Example 1:
BIRGing and CORFing have been studied using the apparel that students wear. Specifically, in one study, researchers...
...surreptitiously monitored — with approval of the institutional review board — how many of over 200 students wore school-affiliated apparel during roll call for each class, throughout the college football season at seven universities.
The researchers found that if a student’s football team won a game, it more than doubled the odds of the student wearing the team’s apparel in the following class. Winning also more than tripled the likelihood of wearing more than two articles of team-branded clothing.
a) Using the table below, classify the two main variables mentioned in this study:
| Variable name (conceptual variable) | How was this variable operationalized? | What are this variable's levels? | Was this a manipulated or measured variable? | Was this an IV, a Quasi IV, or a DV? |
b) Sketch a graph of the study's outcome--be sure to put the DV on the y-axis. (by the way, the original empirical study is here)
c) How do these results support the BIRGing hypothesis?
d) Consider construct validity: Did the study directly measure self-esteem? Why or why not?
Example 2:
The BIRGing hypothesis has also been tested by studying the language soccer fans use to talk about their teams.
In one study, Billings and his colleagues used machine learning to analyze more than 7,000 geo-tagged tweets made during 2018 World Cup matches pitting England against Croatia and Colombia to analyze BIRGing and CORFing in real time.
d) Using the table below, classify the two main variables mentioned in the second study:
| Variable name (conceptual variable) | How was this variable operationalized? | What are this variable's levels? | Was this a manipulated or measured variable? | Was this an IV, a Quasi IV, or a DV? |
e) Think about replicating the first, sports apparel study at your own college or university. How might you do it? Would football be the best sport to use, or some other sport? And do you think the results would replicated at your own school--why or why not?
